


Come Away Little Lamb

by bravelikealady



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Alice Michelle Earp - Freeform, Alice Michelle Earp Holliday, Alice Michelle Holliday, Future Fic, other characters will come later, relationships will be evident later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-07
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-24 21:18:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12021183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bravelikealady/pseuds/bravelikealady
Summary: For years now on the same night every winter someone has left a burning candle and a doll in Alice's window. She's ready to find out who it is... and why they're doing it. She is 12, after all, basically a grown woman.





	1. Chapter 1

“This must be my real birthday,” she thinks. 

 

Aunt Gus celebrates it in the last sun shakes of August… there’s cake, punch, and the watermelon salad she’s loved for as long as she can remember. Her friends from youth fit and dance camp come stay on the farm and they laugh as the sun sets over the hills. Sometimes it’s still warm enough to dip in the creek behind the house. Sometimes the chill of autumn has begun to creep and those years Gus always has smores ready to go.

 

It’s a fine way to celebrate a birthday.

 

But he always comes later in the year. When the leaves have shaken themselves away, when the moon is higher, prouder, and the ground gives to frosts in the night, tendrils of ice unforgiving even for the morning dew. 

 

She wasn’t supposed to see him and for years she didn’t. Only woke to a candle and a doll in her window once a year… when she was, she guesses, about six, she started writing the date down in a little lock-and-key journal she’d been tucking under her bed. 

 

Year 9, she decided there was no way the date was a coincidence. In the way of all children she decided that she absolutely had to stay awake. She’d brush her teeth, and say her prayers, and only pretend to be asleep. And so in the way of all children she fell asleep harder and faster than she ever had.

 

Year 10, she had a fever and had been in Gus’s bed for days, coming in and out of it to the sounds of an ever ringing phone, and Gus scolding someone on the other line. When she’d finally gone back to her room, the candle sat unlit, a box of matches beside it. And yet another doll. Dark hair and blue eyes. Always dark hair and blue eyes.

 

Year 11, she saw him walking away, entirely by accident. She’d woken up desperate for a drink of water and there the candle sat, flickering. But hardly burned down at all. She crept to the window and saw a jacket billow in the window, on a narrow frame, a hat sitting high on a moppy head of hair. She thought about running out into the night air, demanding answers. But she already knew she played a dangerous enough game not telling Gus about this to begin with… 

 

No one ever explicitly told her they were hiding, but she knew.

 

This is year 12.  

 

She thought about confronting Aunt Gus, demanding answers… why were they here? Who were her parents? Why couldn’t she just go to school? But there was no way to do it without telling her about the man in night, every November. A part of her knew Gus might say no, might have good reason to. Well, she couldn’t risk that could she?

 

She waits on the roof. A little Nyquil in Gus’s nightcap oughta keep her safe for a few hours. Three fleece blankets are spread beneath her, protecting her butt from the scratchy tile and the cold. A thermos of hot cocoa is her only weapon. Her pack contains a flashlight, leftover pan fried cheeseburgers, Goldfish, a cell phone she smuggled from a girl she didn’t like very much in her Wednesday fit class ( _ I’ll give it back _ , she told herself over and over, as she pretended to know nothing when the girl had hunted for it in a panic), and a set of binoculars.

 

_ “I swear, Al, you could fall asleep anywhere,”  _ is the phrase of Aunt Gus’s that haunts her here on the roof. Even in the cold, with the best of intentions, and all the wisdom and determination being 12 years old brings, she is heavy lidded and her mind drifts into clouds of thought and varied introspection. As the man first appears, she rubs her eyes, wondering if she is asleep, or damn near hallucinating. But there he is.

 

She takes her binoculars, clicks over to night vision. She tries to creep gracefully to the edge as he places the candle by her window. He seems to mumble something, perhaps a prayer? He reaches his gloved hand into a deep front pocket-  _ another doll _ \- and as his jacket flits about she sees that he is well holstered, deeply armed.

 

Cotton mouthed, her heart races fast.  _ Something is wrong with me, with us _ . She wants to shout down to him, or pounce, or climb and sneak up on him… but her legs are cowards. Her throat betrays her. She opens her mouth and no sound will come out. 

 

This year what he sits beside the candle is not a doll. It is a gun. 

 

She is directly over him now, her head looking down onto the top of his black hat. She tries to reach for her flashlight and her bag slides from around her, slips down the rooftop, scraping loudly along the shingles, and it hits the ground with a thud. 

 

Suddenly, a light in on her, and a gun is aimed at her face. 

 

She raises her hands as best she can.

 

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot.”

 

The man’s face is like her own… severe, Gus called it sometimes, and his eyes are the same wild blue. His face relaxes and it looks like he might be crying as he stares up at her, lowering his gun. She is scared to move.

 

And then a sound, like the howling wind tearing through a wood of banshees, fills the sky. 

 

“Alice,” the man says. “Run. Get Gus and run. Tell her it’s happening.”

 

“What?”

But he’s already gone, running into the night, the man who knows her name, the man who brings her winter gifts... his shots fire into figures she cannot comprehend. As she slides down the side of the house, heading for her Aunt Gus, she hears a wail that sends shivers from hell down through her knees, followed by a man screaming.

 

She turns and runs for her own window, grabbing the gun he left her. Alice begins to climb into her window but something stops her. She turns, horrified by what she sees. She takes a breath, she lifts the gun, she aims....


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She could see the man well now, as the flames underlit his face. He was large in stature, she thought. The only men she’d been around had been the occasionally dad at pick up. She really didn’t have anything to go on. His eyes were hooded by a strong brow and his long face pointed downward, every feature of his face a sharp angle, highlighted by the weirdest beard situation she’d ever seen. She wondered if this is what Aunt Gus meant when she said, “city folk”. Nothing about him was inherently unkind, but he did look very sad. There was something heavy about him and it weighed on her. Is he… my father’s friend? Was that man really my father? Was that man still alive?
> 
> His eyes flickered up from whatever he’d been busying his hands with and she was caught, “You’re awake.”

II.

 

She’d spent two days at a summer camp where they taught her archery before Aunt Gus had gotten nervous and taken her home (Gus set up an archery zone on the farm as an apology and gotten her a shiny new bow of her own, baby blue, like everything else). This--the gun--wasn’t like that. She couldn’t aim at anything, much less  _ through _ anything… she could hardly see at all in the darkness… there had been some intuition involved, pulling the string back from her wrist and using her whole body, focusing her core on her target. She had liked archery. This thing felt heavy in her hands, imbalanced, an enemy. It wasn’t for hunting or sport. It was for killing. 

 

_ Is that man a killer? _

 

She didn’t know. All she knew was that he knew her, Alice, he’d said. Run. All she knew was his screams in the dark were breaking her heart and that had to mean he was a good guy, that she could hear him at all in the chaos around her. The banshee wail continue and she felt like she was surrounded by feuding trains, circling her, threatening to flip off their tracks. She clicked the back of the gun- a hammer, or a spur, or a clip, some word she’d heard on TV- and was about to fire into the night, praying to God she hit something other than that man when suddenly arms were around her.

 

“Come with me,” the voice was unfamiliar.

 

“I--”

 

“No time, let’s move. You don’t wanna see what they’re doing to your father.”

 

“My father?”

 

She was being pulled along helpless. All she could think to do was tuck the gun in the back of her jeans. The man’s screaming stopped.  _ Oh no _ , she thought,  _ no, no, no, no….  _

 

“IS THAT MY FATHER,” Alice was screaming now, fighting the man whose arms held her, “We have to help him, I don’t know you, let me go, let me go!”

 

“ALICE!” Gus called from the front porch. Alice could barely make her out by the flicker of the front porch light. _ I was supposed to change that bulb last weekend.  _

 

“I’m sorry,” she screamed, “I’m sorry!” 

 

It’s all she knew to say.

 

“QUIET,” the man holding her growled.

 

“Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me,” she screamed over and over, and realized she was suddenly the loudest thing out here.

 

He warned her to be quiet again but she couldn’t stop crying, her head was spinning,  _ father, my father, my father.... _

 

A dull pain hit her neck and swam through her skull. The world went black.

\---

Gus was sitting on the top of the old picnic table at the back of the house, watching the sun rise over the field of sunflowers she’d helped Alice plant forever ago. She was singing. 

 

_ The other night, dear, as I lay sleepin’.... _

 

She turned at the sound of Alice letting the screen door go, that old  _ squeeek _ , and smiled, stretching out her hand. Alice could tell she was dreaming. She sang along with Gus anyway.

 

_ I dreamed I held you in my arms. _

_ But once I woke, dear, I was mistaken... _

 

Over and over she tried making it to Gus’s outstretched hand. But she wasn’t moving…. Or she was, it was just… disjointed.

 

The sky flickered red around her.

 

And then he was there, the man with the billowing coat and the hat, the eyes like her’s, the face like her’s, well, except for the mustache… He seemed… scared. He sang, too.

 

_ So I hung my head and I cried... _

 

Flickers or red faded to black and a great big sigh threatened to split the world. And those screams, those inhalations, the sound like banshees, like weeping mountains…

 

“Are you my daddy,” she tried to call, but they were swept away in the fog, Gus and the man who might be her father both. 

 

_ You are my sunshine, my only sunshine…  _

 

\-- 

When Alice opened her eyes the flicker of a small flame greeted her. She thought for a moment that she was back in her room, all of it having been a manic nightmare. She’d missed the man leaving the candle by her window again.  _ Maybe next year.  _ But the cry of the animals in the trees were too loud for to be indoors... and it was not her soft bedding beneath her but the ground. Alice thought she ought not do anything quick. Better to get her bearings, to see what she could see while she still seemed asleep.  _ Or dead _ .

 

Her eyes came to focus and across from her sat the man who had snatched her up back on the farm. A shiver ran through her as she realized how close he’d been this whole time she’d been worrying about what to do or how to act. It was probably only a few seconds, but this didn’t seem like a situation where time was her friend. She didn’t _ feel _ like this man would hurt her, but then her bright idea to chill on the rooftop instead of going to bed had, at least a little bit, led her here. She wasn’t sure she could trust her intuition. Not now. Or ever again. Gus used to get on her about it when she was smaller, how she just went her way regardless, how she’d never met a stranger. How she needed to be careful… _ it looks like Gus was right. She’ll like that. _

  
  


The thought of Gus calling after her from the porch made her throat go dry and her eyes threatened to water. She tried to tuck the thought away, save crying for later. 

 

_ If she’s okay… she’ll like that. _

 

She could see the man well now, as the flames underlit his face. He was large in stature, she thought.  The only men she’d been around had been the occasionally dad at pick up. She really didn’t have anything to go on. His eyes were hooded by a strong brow and his long face pointed downward, every feature of his face a sharp angle, highlighted by the weirdest beard situation she’d ever seen. She wondered if this is what Aunt Gus meant when she said, “city folk”. Nothing about him was inherently unkind, but he did look very sad. There was something heavy about him and it weighed on her. _ Is he… my father’s friend? Was that man really my father? Was that man still alive? _

 

His eyes flickered up from whatever he’d been busying his hands with and she was caught, “You’re awake.”

 

She nodded slightly. 

 

“Here,” he threw a leather pouch at her. “Drink.”

 

“Seriously, are you Aragorn?”

 

He simply looked at her, patient, but unyielding. Alice did as she was told, sipped, struggled to sit upright. 

 

“Let me help you,” he crossed to her and pushed her upwards, letting her lean against him once he sat back down. She wanted to refuse, but she really couldn’t.

 

“I had no choice but to take you down. You were going to get us killed.”

 

She again nodded as best she could. Her neck was stiff. Her entire body felt like it belonged to someone else. The stranger pulled his work from his large coat and returned to it. Spinning knot after knot around thin twigs, the rhythm of his hands became somewhat mesmerizing to Alice. He moved quickly, but deftly. This wasn’t busy work; this served a purpose.

 

“What’s--” her voice broke, nervousness, nausea, exhaustion, with no humor to hide behind, “what’s that for?”

 

“For you, to keep you safe.”

 

“And… who...  are you,” she pushed herself up as she asked and looked up at him, noticing how tousled and strange his undercut hair was, how dark the circles beneath his eyes.  _ He’s as weak as I am in some freaky way _ , she thought.

 

“I’m going to make sure you live, get you home.”

 

She thought about it for a minute.

 

“You don’t mean back to Aunt Gus?”

 

“I don’t mean back to Aunt Gus. I had the pleasure of meeting her once. Kind enough, tough. I think she’ll be alright.”

 

Alice curled her knees into her body, rested her chin upon them, watched the embers die down and light up again in the center of the flames. She wondered if she’d ever see Gus again. Or her bed. Her bow and arrow. She wondered who would feed the chickens in the morning. Could she have avoided all of this, by just going to bed like she was supposed to?  _ Was anything I saw real _ ? Maybe she was just being regular ol’ kidnapped and her mind had added its own flourishes and twists. She’d never lacked imagination, that’s for sure.  _ It can’t be real… can it? _ She remembered seeing the man with the billowing coat, who may or may not be her father, shooting into red rimmed shadows, shadows with fingers like surgical grade claws, shadows that tried to shred him as he screamed. And the sound, the sound they made… 

 

_ It can’t be real. _

 

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she didn’t know why she was being so bold and plucky, but she went with it.

 

“Hmm?”

 

“Who you are, I… what’s your name and why were you there, you could at least tel--”

 

“Robert. I’d been following your father. If I wanted to hurt you I would have by now.”

 

“You keep saying he’s my father. Why do you think that?”

 

He leaned towards her and looked right into her eyes, smirking, “You don’t know who you are.”

 

It wasn’t a question.

 

“I… I do know who I am. And he knew.  And I guess you do, too. But I’ve never met my father. Or my mother. Or anyone for that matter.”

 

“You’re an heir, Sweetheart.”

 

“An heir to what?”

 

He laughed, twisting a final knot through the center of the strange shape, then placed it around her neck with the remaining twine, like a cumbersome costume piece.

 

“You’re the end of line. And everyone is hunting you.”


End file.
